Yahoo wins online Premier League highlights rights

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Speaking at a press conference today, Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo announced that the UK portal will offer five-minute highlight packages for every Premier League match for the next three seasons. Previously, the rights were held by Virgin Media.

The multi-million pound deal follows similar ones in the US for NBA and PGA content, among others, and the video clips will be hosted on yahoo.co.uk.

Yahoo has also secured the rights to syndicate the footage to third parties in the UK, and the highlights will be available to watch, for free, from midnight on Sunday for weekend matches, and midnight the same night for weekday games.

Rich Riley, Yahoo's European managing director, is keen to use this tie-in with the Barclays Premier League to highlight the company's commitment as an entertainment portal: "The acquisition of Premier League rights shows how serious Yahoo is about providing the best in video content for our both our users and advertisers," he said.

However, he doesn't believe that the online highlights video content will compete with conventional mediums, such as TV, rather compliment it. He sees the packages as quick and easy snack-style products, as he exclusively told Pocket-lint: "Consuming video content in these snack formats has become increasingly popular. This is an additional way for football fans to follow their teams rather than an alternative. The aim is to open the content up to wider audiences."

Naturally, the footy fans at PL towers are cock-a-hoop with the announcement. Portsmouth fans, not so.